Re: [PATCH] Improve documentation of BIOS installation

[Colin Watson <cjwatson@ubuntu.com>]

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 08:00:46PM +0100, Barry Jackson wrote:
> On 29/03/11 13:40, Colin Watson wrote:
> >With http://grub.enbug.org/BIOS_Boot_Partition being down at the moment,
> >I went to look at what corresponding documentation there was in the
> >manual.........
> 
> One question that I cannot find an answer for in the manual here :-
> 18.1 GRUB only offers a rescue shell
> It explains that the only available commands are ls, set, unset and insmod.
> So what use is it?
> Assuming that a module is missing or a variable is incorrect, and
> these are corrected with insmod and set - what next?
> I can see no way to boot after correcting things without a 'boot'
> command available. If you can't boot, why bother with set or insmod.
> I just don't get it!

The manual even answers this question directly with an example:

  http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#GRUB-only-offers-a-rescue-shell

See the example after "then you can correct this and enter normal mode
manually".

(Once you are in normal mode with a correct prefix, then commands will
be autoloaded, although you could insmod them manually if you really
wanted.  But this should be self-explanatory once you do it, as entering
normal mode will give you a GRUB menu.)

I've extended the text you refer to
(http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Commands) to link to
this troubleshooting section.  It'll be there the next time we push to
the website.

Regards,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson@ubuntu.com]